


Song of the Cicada

by doublejoint



Series: peachtober 2020 [7]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26884234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: He’d rather be the person he is now, but have Luffy here and a chunk of time that’s just theirs.
Relationships: Monkey D. Luffy/Roronoa Zoro
Series: peachtober 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953295
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45





	Song of the Cicada

**Author's Note:**

> #peachtober day 7: Bugs
> 
> makes certain vague assumptions about the end of the wano arc

If Zoro’s quiet and he moves slowly, no one here notices him in the cover of the night and the low boughs of the trees. He brings the sake bottle back up to his lips, grasped by the neck. Above him, a cicada chirps, and then another, the effect cascading exponentially like a deep rolling wave, until he can’t hear that there are people talking in the clearing behind him, nevermind what they’re saying. Not that it matters.

The cicadas die down again, and he wonders absently if it will rain. The sky’s not cloudy, but it’s easy to think of the rain on a summer island, the sound of rising cicadas above him, a bottle of sake in one hand and Luffy tugging at the other, and fewer weights on his mind, nothing to anticipate and no precise, concrete plans to lay. Nostalgia is an easy trap in which to fall, but it’s not exactly that--he’d rather be the person he is now, but have Luffy here and a chunk of time that’s just theirs. 

Aimless wishing is bad, too, though, isn’t it? He lifts the bottle to his lips again.

* * *

The thunder rolls over the sea, and the lightning sparks, turning the sky into a shattered jar for half a second. Zoro hears the rain above him before he sees it, in front of the tree, between them and the water. There’s very little wind; right here under the leaves they’re sheltered for now. Zoro half-closes his eyes, adjusting the position of the sake bottle under his arm. Beside him, Luffy drops into a crouch; their eye levels are even now.

The rain is falling harder, slapping against the ground faster than Zoro can hear, blurring the scene outside--the path, the trees, and the sea, are muddied as if he’s looking through a row of wine glasses. The thunder sounds again louder; this time the lightning isn’t quite so sharp but the flash is there.

Zoro closes his hand around Luffy’s wrist, firm, trying to tug him into a sitting position; Luffy just lets it stretch a few centimeters--a few seconds later it snaps back and Luffy falls back, half on his ass, half against Zoro’s shoulder. Above them somewhere, the chorus of cicadas rises again, to the same beat as the rain. Luffy squints, like he’s trying to see the cicadas through the leaves. He stretches a hand upward as the chirping dies down again, plunging it into the thick of the leaves, but it comes out empty.

Lightning flashes again. Zoro closes his eyes the rest of the way. Let Luffy keep searching; he’ll probably find one eventually. At any rate, he’ll be fine in the lightning. Zoro’s not made of rubber. 

“Zoro.” Luffy tugs on his cheek.

“What? Ow.”

He opens his eyes. Luffy’s right in front of his face; Zoro has to go almost cross-eyed to see his face properly. Zoro tilts his head, leans forward, and kisses him; half a second in Luffy pulls back and laughs.

“What?” says Zoro.

“I was just seeing if you were still awake.”

“So you didn’t want to kiss me?”

“Well,” says Luffy, and leans back in, and for a moment Zoro debates turning away but--he won’t, and they both know it.

* * *

After Luffy and the rest finally get there, their plans speed up, reorganize, reshuffle; it’s more accurate to say that they have part of a plan while the rest is in flux, because however much Law and Kin’emon try, it’s Luffy they’re up against and they still haven’t quite learned that it’s best to make your plans either independent from whatever he does or accounting for that variability.

They’ll pull it off in the end, somehow; Zoro’s not overly concerned about that part. It wouldn’t help if he were.

And still, they have no time to steal for themselves. (Zoro should have gone to Whole Cake with that group, maybe; he could have had some time with Luffy then, and maybe he’d still have his sword. Not that it really would have made sense, not that he might not have ended up thinking along the same lines if they were there. And he really doesn’t like sweets.) Fingers twist together; they lean into the same shared space; something or someone pulls them right back out of it.

Zoro is, of course, correct about the outcome; they even make it through this one a little less beat-up than usual, both of them up and walking and fine enough in a day or so. There’s enough chaos and there are so many people that it’s easy to slip out into the garden and just sit for a while, looking up at the shapes of the clouds in the sky.

Behind them, in a tree, the cicadas rise into song again, louder, perhaps, than they’d been when Zoro had heard them alone. He looks at Luffy, and he can tell Luffy’s thinking about that island, somewhere behind them on the Grand Line, with the perpetual summer. Luffy tips back his hat and stretches up his neck to lean his head on Zoro’s shoulder.

* * *

Zoro dozes halfway off with his hand open, a promise to hold onto any bugs Luffy catches extracted from him like the last olive in a jar. The leaves rustle above him; the pattern of the rain is softer and the thunder moves farther away. He feels Luffy’s hand deposit something in his palm; he waits for it to move but it stays put. Should he close his fist? Do cicadas fly? Is he too far into sleep to move his hand without waking himself all the way up? Maybe this one’s dead.

“Zoro! There are a ton up here!”

Luffy’s voice sounds distant, farther than the thunder.

When Luffy wakes him up, there are four cicadas in his palm, all of them sitting pretty calmly. They’re actually cool to look at close up; Zoro doesn’t know that he ever has. He peers closely at them.

“Cool, right?”

Zoro nods; his mouth is still dry from sleep. He’s got the rest of the sake, but he doesn’t want to move too much and disturb the cicadas.

“You got a jar or something to put them in?”

“Yup!”

Luffy pokes at the glass when the cicadas are inside; they seem more interested in the leaves he’d put in with them than either each other or Luffy. Zoro leans back against the base of the tree.

“We can go now. Nami said not to be late.”

Zoro shrugs. “It’s still raining. We’ve got time.”

“You just want to go back to sleep,” says Luffy, which, fair.

Still, though they have what they came for, that doesn’t mean they need to leave. He caps the sake and closes his eyes. A second or two later, Luffy settles in beside him.


End file.
